FlashForward: "Future Shock" Review

Blackouts, bombs and...the end.

So that was FlashForward, huh? Oh, well. At least no one can accuse it of going out with a whimper. The last ten minutes of "Future Shock" were a rockum sockum shoot 'em up that totally made me overlook most of the malarky that this series was trying to pass off as cleverness. It was kind of fun to watch Mark (Joseph Fiennes) almost single-handedly take out Hellinger's fake, masked SWAT team (why were they masked again?). And I know I shouldn't have liked the "what did you see?" line that Mark said to the dude before he blasted a hole in his chest, but I did. So there. And of course, he didn't really kill a dozen guys all by himself, but he killed most of them. Wedeck and Vreede ran back into the bomb-ridden building to open fire on a few baddies as well and it was pretty great to see those two, well, do something; Wedeck, because he was always such a hindrance and Vreede because, well, he doesn't exactly look like an action hero.

Which leads me to the twists. Yes, the part of the show where we found out that everything was going to play out semi-similarly to all the character's future visions; almost the same but just a little different. If I really took two giant steps back I'd wonder what the point of all of it really was and we'd start getting into some dangerous ranting territory. To think that all our characters fretted over winding up the horrible places that they saw in their flash visions and then still, essentially, let themselves fall into to those positions and then be fortunate enough that everything wound up playing out differently, and mostly to their advantage. I did like that Wedeck actually wound up in the bathroom stall though. I also liked that Mark wound up shooting everyone to hell (although we'd already seen the FBI offices - that one set - get shot to hell) , that Dylan was the one to write the lipstick tachyon constant formula on the mirror and that Simon's totally random text of Lloyd's email signature wound up being the thing Lloyd needed to solve the equation and predict the blackout. Those were all acceptable. Vogel's "Mark Benford is dead" line was a total cheat since it wound up being something like "Mark Benford is dead...if he doesn't get out of that building full of bombs." Booooo!

"Olivia, I'm afraid that science has decreed that we must bone."

Lloyd (Jack Davenport) proved to be the master of seduction after actually convincing Olivia (Sonya Walger) to go back to her bedroom with him and make out. For science. He was really the only person to pull the old "we have to recreate things exactly I saw them or else everyone will die" scam which might make him the greatest person ever. I'm not sure why Olivia decided that she and Charlie should go sleep out on the beach in Santa Monica in order to try and avoid Lloyd. There are literally motels right up the block from there with bed-shaped sleeping apparatuses.

I enjoyed the fact that, when Mark does figure out when the next blackout will take place (we'll shuffle past the totally BS string to letters technique) he finds out it's going to be within the next 10 minutes. Wow. So another 30 million dead, huh? This show is vicious. Of course, when we see everyone on the ground at the end, they're all fairly safe and docile. No exploding helicopters. No chaos. But there had to be death and destruction all over the world again. Wedeck only had three minutes to warn the President, who then had to turn around and alert the entire planet. That's not enough time to land all the freakin' planes or stop all the cars and trains. This was another worldwide obliteration but it got portrayed, this time around, as nap time.

So, Lloyd's big moment was to use the equation to figure out that the blackout would take place within the next two days and then it was up to Mark figure out the exact time. It was all meant to show us that the Mosaic board was important after all and not just a collection of farts and failures. I guess the real hero in all this was Gabriel, who was the one who moved all the strings around to point to letters, creating a puzzle that only the caveman genius Mark Benfod could figure out. Why he couldn't have just told everyone that the blackout would happen at 10:14, I don't know.

Bryce wound up with his Keiko. Nicole wound up getting saved from drowning by some nice, clean-cut young man. Janis wound up getting an ultrasound and finding out that she's having a *gasp* boy. And Simon (Dominic Monaghan) and Demetri (John Cho) wound up...well, bickering to the end. And we got the big second blackout - sending us five years into the future. Was it five? I saw the date 2015. But Charlie looked too old for just a five year leap. Oh, well. I could play it all back and try to figure out all the mysterious images, but it's all moot at this point. They were meant for a series that will now never be.